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Maybe why writing is hard

This morning, the more I write, the more my thoughts jump ahead of what I’m writing. The writing is making me think, and the thinking is making the writing very difficult.

Writing is hard anyway. Some people would like to hire ghostwriters to capture their thoughts. These people mistake writing for the visual transmission of one’s thoughts. Instead, writing is thinking. Writing makes us think, and the process of writing makes us discover realizations and examples and exceptions and connections that slow down the writing.

Ghostwriting carries an essential fraud, and not because one person is writing in another’s name. The fraud is the illicit self-protection the ghostwriter provides, similar to the self-protection each spouse can access in marriage counseling. If I am in marriage counseling, I have an out: when the counseling gets too close, I tell myself and my counselor that it’s my spouse’s fault. If I hire a ghostwriter, I have an out: I’m not challenged to fix the words and the thinking they represent because they’re never thrown back at me. The best marriage counselors treat “marriage counseling” as a necessary euphemism and get their clients to take responsibility for their own lives. And the best ghostwriters insist on involving their clients in the writing process.

Our president and his immediate predecessor wrote important memoirs. President Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, and President Trump wrote The Art of the Deal. President Obama wrote his memoir. President Trump hired a ghostwriter to write his, and the ghostwriter latter admitted that he never challenged his client. The two presidents couldn’t be any more different in their integrity and capacity for reflection.